[3am]

My experience is that when something is filesystem based, you eventually have someone write a not-robust-enough bash script to do some maintenance operation (find|xargs|rm cleanup script, a sed based update script, etc) and it blows stuff up.

I think the transaction log and the forced structure of using SQL (barring some yutz carelessly using TRUNCATE) add some value managing the data, too. Not as big an issue where it's a single person maintaining the app.

[iradik]

i agree with your point. yet i've seen people make the same mistakes with sql too (they have autocommit=on haha).

hopefully whatever solution you have is tested and designed defensively so you don't accidentally rm the queue.